Re-constructing heritage: the National Theatre of Scotland’s Calum’s Road

David Harrower’s adaptation of Roger Hutchinson’s novel, Calum’s Road (2011, 2013) tells the real-life story of Calum MacLeod, and his quest to build a road from Arnish to South Arnish on the island of Raasay in the Inner Hebrides. Calum is representative of the everyday hero that can be found throughout Scottish texts and stories—one that remains true to himself, and fights for the cause he believes in, no matter how small it may seem to the government, or the people around him. The play highlights a dying age, and yet emphasizes the importance of merging the past with the ever changing present and is ultimately a celebration of failure. This article explores the role of heritage and heroism within Harrower’s play and, by extension, contemporary Scotland, by examining the relationship between struggle and failure, as well as the mutual responsibility within the national community to work to create a new image of the Scottish nation.


Introduction
The play Calum's Road, adapted by playwright David Harrower from the non-fiction book of the same name by September 2011. The initial tour lasted three months, culminating in a production at the Raasay Community Hall in November 2011. The show was revived and toured to different Scottish cities in 2013 for a shorter six-week tour.
For the purposes of this article, I am referencing the text used for the second tour. The script refers to each actor by their first name only, and their name is in all caps, whereas the character names are depicted in sentence case.
Harrower has adapted many other works, including plays such as Buchner's Woyzeck, Chekhov's Ivanov and Schiller's Mary Stuart, the latter of which was produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) in collaboration with the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Citizens' Theatre. He has also adapted novels for the stage, including John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. Within these works he takes well-known stories from the stage and gives them a modern, and often uniquely Scottish twist. In Calum's Road, Harrower adapts a legendary story that is already Scottish, and thus he allows the story to speak for itself without too many theatrical additions or unconventional staging techniques. He builds upon his adaptation experience, and utilizes the fragmented story-telling technique found within the 2008 NTS and Edinburgh Theatre Festival co-production of 365. However, unlike 365, Harrower manages to connect the fragments and create a coherent story that touches on themes of Scottish national identity as embodied by one man from the Hebrides. The story of Calum MacLeod's life examines government roadblocks, the rapidly declining population of the islands, and the waning popularity of Gaelic, and on a cursory look may seem to lack the intensity or even drama of his famed Blackbird or Knives in Hens, plays remembered for their moments of violence and serious subject matter as much as anything else. However, the drama within Calum's Road, which follows the source text closely, is held within Calum's passion for his island, and his determination to save his culture. Calum's heroism is not the bloody-bladed heroism of the conquering warrior, and the seeming gentleness of Harrower's adaptation highlights the slow and subtle alterations occurring to Raasay from an island focused on community and belonging, to one of isolation and disconnect. I assert that the purpose of the 2013 NTS production was not to merely share a story about a famous islander, but also to re-kindle an interest in the multifaceted nature of Scottish heritage through a connection to material environments and contemporary lore. Before devolution, many Scottish plays toyed with realism by utilising location-specific dialects, such as the gritty Glaswegian as compared to the softer lowland dialect common in Edinburgh (Hutchinson, 1996, p.225). Workingclass and political theatre became popular in the 1970s and pushed the envelope with the tours of theatre group 7:84 1 (Smith, 1996, p.277). All of these changes in stage portrayals of Scottish life paved the way for the stage depictions of a devolved Scotland. Gaelic plays even found a short renaissance, as Gaelic theatre thrived in the early 1980s (Smith, 1996, p.286). Shortly after the referendum leading to devolution passed in 1997, David Harrower, along with fellow playwright David Greig, wrote an article in The Scotsman arguing for art that challenges the vision of contemporary Scotland; 'To redefine ourselves we need to understand ourselves, exchange ideas and aspirations, confront enduring myths, expose injustices, and explore our past' (Reid, 2012, p.82). The emphasis in Greig and Harrower's op-ed is on redefining the Scottish nation in a way that is actively chosen by the people. Calum's Road specifically 'brings to mind the community-oriented performances of 7:84 and reflects the competing and often fusing discourse of the age of globalization' (Śledzińska, 2013, p.131). The theatre must be in dialogue with the people in terms of fresh ideas and goals of the nation as Scotland continues to be established as a politically independent entity. The theatre itself is not a solo agent of change, but can be the locus for conversation and visions of complex national identities, especially those removed from the global eye. Plays like Calum's Road, though seemingly innocent, seek to explore the history of a nation that is so fraught with tension.
Calum's Road serves as an ideal example of how theatre can work to represent those often excluded from the national image created and propagated by the elites. The audience is introduced to real life in the Western Isles, from rides on the ferries to the use of Gaelic and the eating of cormorant sandwiches. Life is not depicted as romantic and exciting, but instead hard and tedious. In this way the play 'confronts enduring myths' of the rural life, and seeks to clarify the role of Raasay in relation to mainland Scotland (Reid, 2012, p.82). The kailyard 2 approach of sentimentalising rural life is an easy way to depict a certain subset of Scots that to city dwellers is quaint, charming and an escape from the trials of city life. However, this type of depiction does nothing to celebrate the various cultures that actually exist across Scotland, but instead 'evidence a destructive false consciousness, a neurotic and infantilised national psyche' (Reid, 2012, p.7).
In lieu of romanticising the existence of Calum MacLeod, the NTS chose to depict the realistic life of one man, and to challenge visions of the Highlands and Western Isles.
'Through the questioning of old national iconographies and long-established discourses, the National Theatre of Scotland is making a crucial and largely innovative step in the (still very recent) process of internalisation of the longmythologized Highland "Other"' (Śledzińska, 2013, p.135).
Projections used throughout the show help to shatter this false consciousness by depicting the actual island. The audience is given a picture of the brutality of the island as well as its beauty. These images help to emphasise the amount of work that living on the islands takes. The Our story begins one blustery morning LEWIS.
Our story begins one blue sky cloudless morning CEIT.
One rain-drenched wind-blasted morning ANGELA.
On the island of Raasay (Harrower, 2013, pp.2-3) With each moment of the story retold, the audience should be transported from the theatre to a realm of lore, where each detail is remembered a bit differently, and the truth doesn't so much matter as the tale itself. Calum's story exists as an oral tale, depicting men and women who are renowned, exaggerated and misremembered. We as the audience hear a compilation of all these versions, and are left to judge for ourselves how much the 'truth' matters.  (Reinelt, 2008, p.236). Though Calum's Road celebrates a hero of the past, it is constantly looking forward to how his legacy impacts the lives of people today throughout Scotland. National theatres in Europe often act as an avatar for the nation-state, the assembled audience represent the nation as a whole and it is that assemblage that often is the most important. Loren Kruger (2008, p.39) suggests it is the 'national assembly, rather than the linguistic or cultural consistency of the repertoire, [that] is the essential point of theatrical nationhood'. This builds on the fact that cultural national narratives often blur history and folklore (Wilmer, 2008, p.17). Calum's inherent connection to and knowledge of his island paints him as a lad o'pairts whose seemingly banal observances set him apart from the common man. In 'Calum's Road 1', Calum references Thomas Aitken's Road making and maintenance: a practical treatise for engineers, surveyors and others 4 (Harrower, 2013, p.8 JULIA. To begin his road my father deviated slightly from Aitken`s advice. He scared the sheep. And noted how, as the sheep scattered and fled, they unfailingly took the shortest route between two points. LEWIS. With this ascertained, Calum marked and pegged the full length of the road, day after day, his postbag over his shoulder, using a trowel, two miles of reel, and hundreds of silver fish hooks.
By using the sheep, Calum is able to really adhere to the formation of the land. By trusting his own eyes, Calum may overlook a small hillock or a grade that was invisible to the naked eye but difficult to traverse. The sheep are familiar with the stretch of the path, and since sheep are naturally lazy creatures they take the path of least resistance. Calum is contending with the geological fabric of the island, and by respecting the natural shape of the land he is able to craft a road that is less of a new addition to an ancient island, and more of a re-shaping of a natural track. He is only one man, yet he is receiving assistance from the land and its fauna in order to build this road. He is a hero for his efforts, but we as the audience clearly see that he is not enough to build the nation. Calum is a hero larger than life at this moment, for he is so fully connected to the land that he can anticipate its needs better than a professional builder, but he alone cannot keep Raasay's heritage alive and thriving.
The portrayal of Calum's struggle with the natural environment of mud, roots and rocks likens him to a warrior and battle-worn hero. He fights these natural elements while he is trying to preserve the landscape. His campaign to build a road creates a tension between the past and the future, as well as between the ease of staying and leaving.  (Harrower, 2013, p.3). Julia uses language of war to describe her father's actions, he has to fight the terrain and to tame it to his will, and Calum is clearly the warrior hero before our eyes. It is an uphill battle, as he hacks away at old trees and moves rocks from place to place. The land that he loves so much has become his enemy. It is preventing people from staying on the island, so he has to choose sides for this battle and the land lost to the people.
Calum not only battles the landscape, but also battles the infrastructure on the island and the oppressive past that it  (Harrower, 2013, p.49 (Harrower, 2013, p.49). Calum decides that he would not simply blow up the wall, for in some way that seemed too easy to defeat such a large presence in the island's history, 'Instead he dismantled it by hand, stone by stone. To this day no one knows how he celebrated the toppling of Rainy's wall' (Harrower, 2013, p.49).
The layering of the road is then reinforced through the format of the play. The scenes are episodic, and take place in both the past and the present. Each major scene, such as the actual building of the road, the memory of a blizzard, Iain Calum's Road celebrates his isolation by connecting it back to a shared experience. The play may be about one man and one road, but his experience is much like those of many people who have worked hard and have been defeated.
There is a futility to Calum's building project, as his road ultimately only serves three people, but it is still a road worth having. The NTS emphasises that the problems on the local level are the problems of the nation, and that the two are always connected-by people, by experiences, and by a certain level of shared cultural heritage. Notes 1.The theatre company 7:84 specifically worked to level the audience through their highly political, pro-Scottish tours of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973).
2.Kailyard addresses the 'prodigious array of Kitsch symbols, slogans, ornaments, banners, sayings and sentiments (not a few of them "pithy") which have for so long resolutely defended the name of "Scotland" to the world' (Nairn, 1977, p.162). These images tend to represent a romanticised and nostalgic vision of Scotland, while failing to take into account the often grim realities of Scottish life.
3.In Paula Śledzińska's 'Revisiting the Other: National Theatre of Scotland and the Mythologization of the Highlands and Islands' she cites Peter Womak's assertation that the Highlands, and by extension the Islands, are simply accepted as 'Romantic' locations without debate.
5.Though most of these clearances are recorded as mutually agreed upon, or were undertaken with fair compensation, the clearances mark the start of Rainy's unfair level of control over the people of Raasay.
6.Sometimes spelled 'cotters', these were peasant farmers who would rent small farm space to grow crops and lived in small cottages. These were different from crofters who owned their own houses, but only rented crofting land.